not rule of law, but rather \u201crule by law.\u201d<\/a>\u200b \u200b<\/p>\nChina\u2019s leaders defend their system, describing it as \u201crule of law with Chinese characteristics.\u201d They argue it is best suited to China\u2019s \u201cnational conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The World Justice Project results don\u2019t contradict this view. As expected, they give China some of the worst scores on protection of fundamental rights like \u201cfreedom of speech\u201d and \u201cconstraints on government power.\u201d At the same time, China ranks a lofty eighth in its income class in \u201corder and security,\u201d a category that measures violence and crime.<\/p>\n
The index emphasizes security to reflect a comprehensive, broadly applicable definition of rule of law, said Alejandro Ponce, chief researcher for the World Justice Project. The project tried to avoid bias in favor of Western notions of rule of law, which tend to emphasize constraints on state power, he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, it\u2019s a societal trade off. It\u2019s what you prefer. More security but less freedoms, or the other way around,\u201d he said. \u201cIn principle, rule of law should apply to different systems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even so, North American and Western European countries accounted for eight of the top 10 spots globally (Denmark topped the list. The U.S. was 18th).<\/p>\n
In East Asia, the top-ranking countries were New Zealand and Singapore, which finished eighth and ninth globally. The most improved country in the region was Vietnam, which rose seven spots to 67th. The Philippines fell the most, dropping nine spots to 70th.<\/p>\n
The index was compiled by polling ordinary people in major cities and surveying local lawyers in late 2015 and the first half of this year. To guard against political pressure on respondents, researchers asked potentially sensitive questions in multiple ways and checked data against third-party sources, Mr. Ponce said.<\/p>\n
One area where China seemed to progress was in protecting the right to information, moving up significantly in the rankings in the past two years. But Mr. Ponce warned that the category\u2019s results might be skewed after the project changed its methodology for measuring that category. China also edged up in the criminal-justice ranking.<\/p>\n
\u201cChina is good at the very basic stuff\u201d in providing information to its citizens, he said, but it continues to score low in offering access to more sensitive information.<\/p>\n
Chinese President Xi Jinping\u2019s antigraft campaign also helped, nudging China to eighth in East Asia in the \u201cabsence of corruption category,\u201d up from ninth in 2015.<\/p>\n
\u2013Josh Chin<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new global ranking finds China is making limited progress<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/docs.uyghuramerican.org\/images\/BN-QJ257_1020cl_J_20161020050431.jpg\")
<\/p>\n